Monday, March 30, 2015

Some GSS data germane to Heartiste's recent post founded on the basic, veritable premises that female attractiveness is primarily defined by physical appearance while male attractiveness is far more contingent upon other characteristics, especially status, follow.

Since male attractiveness is determined more by status than female attractiveness is, we'd expect to see a stronger positive correlation between things like educational attainment and marital status among men than among women.

And that is indeed what we see. The proceeding table shows the percentages of respondents aged 40-65 by educational attainment who were either married or widowed when they participated in the survey (n = 2,735):

% married among

%Men

%Women

Less than HS

56.0

59.3

HS grad

66.6

70.4

Some college

65.9

67.4

Bachelor degree

75.1

70.3

Graduate degree

78.0

72.3

Once we get above the underclass of high school dropouts, a woman's education has little discernible influence on whether or not she is successfully married. Among men, on the other hand, there is an upward trajectory of marital prospects as educational attainment increases.

This complements the previous finding that contemporary male reproductive trends in the US are marginally eugenic and female reproductive trends moderately dysgenic.

Saturday, March 28, 2015

Even if it's magnanimously granted that the push for and acceptance of same-sex marriage was primarily driven by a desire for perceived equality, it looks like the redefining of the institution is going to be a consequence. Over the last four consecutive survey years, the GSS has asked married respondents, categorized by sexual orientation, whether they have ever had sex with someone other than a spouse while married. The results (n = 5,380):

The sample sizes for homosexuals and bisexuals are small (26 and 67, respectively), but it's striking how well these results corroborate those revealed in a NYT article that slipped under the radar in early 2010. The piece mentioned a study in San Francisco of 556 gay male couples that found:

About 50 percent of those surveyed have sex outside their relationships, with the knowledge and approval of their partners.

That consent is key. “With straight people, it’s called affairs or cheating,” said Colleen Hoff, the study’s principal investigator, “but with gay people it does not have such negative connotations.”

Gay marriage is one cultural schism put to use by the Lords of Lies toward the redefinition and de-stigmatization of marriage from an organic mate pair system which safeguards the primacy of paternity assurance to a free-for-all “liberation” that corrodes trust between heterosexual couples and renders hetero beta males wholly prostrate to an antagonistic marriage market stripped of any protections for their particular interests.

Mark my words, a massive elite push to legitimize and maybe even codify polyamory is next on the agenda.

Those who continue to claim that same-sex marriage will have no affect on heterosexual marriage are either disingenuous or naive. Speaking of naivety, one might think that awareness of as much would've been germane to the discussion about whether or not legalizing same-sex marriage was a good idea. You see though, poor naif, in America we like to push things through first and then find out what it was we pushed through by the consequences that follow as a result!

Homosexuals have become sacred objects over the last couple of decades in the West. The pace of deification has been such that Vespasian would've been impressed. Consequently, criticism of homosexual mores is not tolerated in polite company or professional circles. As more gays marry up without shackling up, the concept of open marriage will lose the "negative connotations" that currently surround it. It will also inevitably lose its place as the societal bedrock of nuclear family formation in the process. Besides raising 'problematic' issues of paternal uncertainty, marriage devoid of expectations of exclusivity becomes little more than a legal maneuver for the purposes of expediting property transfers and reducing income tax bills.

Saturday, March 21, 2015

The 2014 GSS data are out. Converting wordsum results to IQ scores with an average wordsum of 6.11 and a standard deviation of 1.83 wordsum points, the mean IQ of 2012 presidential election voters by who they voted for (n = 988):

Voted for

IQ

Obama

99.0

Romney

100.8

3rd party

105.3

SWPLs can take some pride in how things look if only white voters are considered:

Voted for

IQ

Obama

103.6

Romney

101.2

3rd party

106.0

Implicit pride, of course. Pointing out that NAMs depress the average IQ scores of Democrats is only something the wrong kind of white people would ever do. SWPLs are too intelligent to do anything as crass and uncouth as that!

Obama is correct when he asserts that mandatory voting would be "transformative". The intellectually impotent mainstream right has no answer for why, in a country where democracy is venerated as the unquestioned (and unquestionable) apogee of political systems, anything other than universal suffrage should be the aspiration. March of progress, being on the right--er, correct!--side of history, etc.

As someone who is emphatically inegalitarian, it seems to me that electoral influence should in some way be associated with financial contribution to the apparatus of the state. Say, one vote for every digit of federal income taxes paid, starting with the third in the calendar year prior to the vote in question and net tax eaters being ineligible to vote at all. That is, someone who pays $200 in taxes gets one vote; $2000 gets two votes; $20,000 three votes, and so forth, with a maximum of say five or so votes.

I see no a priori reason why someone who contributes nothing to the treasury should have a part in determining how said treasury resources are spent, and certainly not a part on par with those who do contribute. If any company, organization, or even family (want your kids to do the family budgeting?) operated in that way, we'd be right to predict fiscal catastrophe to likely follow as a consequence. And so here we are.

Obama's party has obvious political interests in getting electoral activity from marginalized populations that currently can't (high schoolers, inmates, immigrants) or won't ('low information' citizens) vote, but bringing those segments of the population to the ballot box will just accentuate the problems the government faces. There is no conceivable way that we ever enjoy a stable currency or a balanced federal budget given the current system.

Saturday, March 14, 2015

The only thing that would make the ongoing fiasco in Ferguson more instructive as a series of ‘teachable moments’ is if the city happened to have the name Springfield(, USA). It's a sordid microcosm of the entire country.

Ferguson used to be a functional, middle class American suburb. As its demographics changed, fueled by the State's economic sabotage against it in the form of housing vouchers, its founding stock began moving out. With them went the values and behaviors necessary to maintain said functional, middle class suburban life. Blight crept in and dysfunction crept up.

Last August, a rather routine instance of Blacks Behaving Badly escalated. Darren Wilson, the quintessential archetype of dutiful, civic-minded traditionalist America responds exactly as he is supposed to respond. A perpetually aggrieved mob, its opportunistic hangers-on, and its self-appointed race-hustling leaders bray for his blood. In this particular telling, Pontius Pilate, played by Robert McCulloch, doesn't actually sate their blood lust because the tale of Michael Brown's putative victimhood is so thoroughly and entirely a calumny, from start to finish, that even Ingsoc couldn’t give it a veneer of truth.

Countless media personalities--from the harpies on CNN to the double-digit IQgladiators of the St. Louis Rams--perpetuated the big lie. Every one of these ignorant haters is engaged in blood libel against an innocent man, and by extension, against Core America, as the former light of the world disappears into the historical gloam. Any incorrigible minorities who refuse to get on board with this nonsense are slandered alongside white Americans who do the same as race traitors, Uncle Toms who prosper from the exploitation of their coethnics.

In retribution, the collective resources of the Establishment are marshaled against Ferguson. No matter how it’s sliced, there is simply no standard under which Wilson can be found to have acted improperly, but that isn't enough to spare his city. 'Disparate impact'--an unavoidable consequence of the disparities in behaviors between members of different populations--is a millstone that has been thrown around Ferguson's collective neck. And a precedent is being set that will allow the federal government to throw millstones around the necks of any municipalities in the country the Establishment has a problem with in the future.

Ferguson is no different than any other city in the US in this regard. To the contrary, an extensive review of police records indicates that Ferguson's black-white arrest rate disparity puts it at 1,582nd out of 3,538 municipalities across the US, or the 45th percentile and thus almost perfectly representative of the national average. That, of course, is exactly the point. See, all of middle class white America is being indicted here for the sin of being unable to magically transform black and brown minorities into middle class white Americans.

This racially-motivated Inquisition isn’t without consequences--fatal consequences. The blood of Zemir Begic is on Eric Holder’s hands and as the assassination attempt of a couple of Ferguson cops demonstrated earlier this week, he’ll be culpable for a lot more blood that will spill in the future. The few functioning remnants of the city will now melt away in the face of the federal government’s relentless persecution. When the exodus is finished, the transformation of Ferguson into another East St. Louis will be complete.

Barack Obama likes to talk about how the thugs whose sinews met the unforgiving blade of justice could have been him in the past or his son in the present. If that doesn’t push the bile to the tip of your tongue, I don’t know what will. Does anyone, anywhere really believe that the privilege poor white kids from broken homes in rural West Virginia allegedly benefit from gives them a greater leg up in life than that set of oppressed colored kids with names like, oh, I don’t know, Sasha and Malia, could ever hope to enjoy?

The historical US is being picked apart from every side. The ranks of the takers keep growing, as does their resentment towards the dying beast they’re plundering. And, correspondingly, the ranks of the makers diminish. With apologies to Nietzche, the US is dead, and the ‘American people’ have killed it, both by acts of commission and, more crucially, by acts of omission. It’s time to chop the moribund old oak tree apart and hope that some saprolings in the soil below grow into something fruitful in the future. Here’s to planting the seed of secession in the minds of as many people as I am able to.

Parenthetically, though, a hypothetical formula like the one Steve is after would have to be careful not to artificially boost the apparent average intelligence of states with wider IQ distributions at the expense of states with more cognitive parity--ie, California's college admissions test takers look better vis-a-vis North Dakota's college admissions test takers than California's entire 8th grade student body does vis-a-vis North Dakota's entire 8th grade student body because diversity = disparity.

My guess is that a carefully designed synthesized measure won't deviate much from what NAEP reveals. Using a slapdash index calculated by taking a state's ACT composite average, multiplying it by 71.333 (to nominally scale it to the SAT mean), multiplying that by a state's ACT participation rate divided by the sum of its ACT and SAT participation rates and then adding that to a state's SAT composite average multiplied by its SAT participation rate divided by the sum of its ACT and SAT participation rates, we get a correlation of .64 (p-value = 0.00000004) with NAEP 8th grade math and reading assessment scores. Clean the formula up and address potential confounding factors--there are several states, for example, where the ACT is compulsory for high school juniors--and the correlation is virtually certain to become even stronger.

Saturday, March 07, 2015

IQ estimates converted from 8th grade 2013 NAEP math and reading assessments by eligibility for the national school lunch program, a federally assisted meal program that provides "low-cost or free lunches to school children" from low-income households follow. The scores for both tests are on a 500 point scale, with a standard deviation of 37 on the math assessment and 34 on the reading assessment. In the subsequent table, these are converted into IQ estimates with a mean of 98--corresponding to the national average NAEP scores of 283.62 for math and 266.02 for reading--and a standard deviation of 15. The math and reading scores are weighted equally:

Eligible?

IQ

Yes

92.6

No

103.4

More Cathedral trolling here (or rather more bait for the purpose). If we apply the same logic here that gets applied by educational romantics about how giving kids more access to and expecting them to spend more time acquiring education will make them as smart as kids from leafy suburbs, the solution for Closing the Gap* becomes obvious--take away the poor urchins' free lunches! Free food stigmatizes the children who receive it. Give a kid a lunch and he will be hand-to-mouth for his whole life, but force his family to provide provisions on their own and he will eat well forever!

* The social class gap, that is, which no one really cares about anymore. The privilege poor white kids from broken homes in rural West Virginia enjoy gives them a far greater leg up in life than oppressed coloreds with names like Malia and Sasha could ever hope for--that's the nation's primary disgrace!

Thursday, March 05, 2015

When the nebulous and obfuscating phrase "bad schools" is employed by Cathedral votaries, the idea that students are anything other than the outputs of their external environments is taken for granted. There are lots of rotating factors that are identified as influencing student academic performance, but the quality and composition of the students is rarely, if ever, included among them (even though it is likely the single most important one). Consequently, most of what passes for research on how to improve educational outcomes is garbage.

With that in mind, let's have some fun tapping the NAEP well again to look at 8th grade student performance by the races of teachers said students had in their math and reading courses. The scores for both tests are on a 500 point scale, with a standard deviation of 37 on the math assessment and 34 on the reading assessment. In the subsequent table, these are converted into IQ estimates with a mean of 98--corresponding to the national average NAEP scores of 283.62 for math and 266.02 for reading--and a standard deviation of 15. The math and reading scores are weighted equally:

Similarly here the Cathedral's instinct is to actually view these results more as IQ scores than as measures of elastic scholastic performance. It's not that NAM teachers are pedagogically less effective than white teachers are, it's just that white teachers tend to get smarter students! When other variables like the socio-economic status and racial characteristics of the students are measured, however, performance reverts to merely being a measure of elastic scholastic performance rather than of IQ, and the depressed scores of NAMs and the poor are a result of external environmental disadvantages. Keeping track of what causes what under what circumstances can be tricky business, but that's what expensive preparatory educations are for!

One could have some fun executing a polemical pincer of an unsuspecting SWPL by leading with the assertion that white and Asian teachers get better performance from their students than black and Hispanic teachers do. Trapping the poor creature will be almost too easy.

To cause some more uncomfortable squirming, converted IQ scores among black 8th grade students from results on NAEP math and reading tests by the race of their teachers in the respective subjects using the same methodology as before follow:

Mean IQ of black students with teachers who are...

White

91.6

Asian

90.3

Black

89.6

Hispanic

88.4

White teachers get modestly better results from their black students than black teachers do. It might naively be thought that white privilege and systematic oppression of minorities by whites would result in the unfortunate black kids being taught by white racist teachers suffering academically as a result, with black students only able to flourish when instructed by amicable souls who share their racial background. Alas!

Monday, March 02, 2015

From the Washington Post, via Derb, a glimpse at the kind of conditioning young American military personnel are undergoing. In response to a video arguing that the three most destructive words a boy hears growing up are "be a man":

[A second-year midshipman responded that] "when someone says, ‘Be a man,’ the alternative to not being a man is kind of being a female, being a woman.” He said that implies women--including their own female classmates at the academy--are not as strong as men. “That’s a lot of the root causes of all these things,” he said. “That’s wrong.”

“That was awesome. That was fantastic. Great point,” said Joshua Malone, 21, a fourth-year midshipman from New York. He was one of two peer educators leading the session.

I suppose in the emasculated, androgynous environment that is the contemporary state of the US armed forces, the word "wrong", in the primary definitional sense of describing something that is evil or wicked, is probably exactly what academy administrators are aiming for.

Of course, the assertion that there is something factually incorrect about pointing out that men are stronger than women is blatantly untrue. That the discussion leader encouraged this bullshit tells you everything you need to know about the sorry psychological state of America's military establishment.

Razib Khan points to a study showing that the very strongest female athletes are about at parity with the physical strength of the average male (as measured by grip strength, which is a good measure since it's not widely 'trained and so serves as a great proxy for innate anchor strength). The strength of the average woman puts her below the 10th percentile of the average man.

We don't have to turn to scientific studies or even infinite personal anecdotes to see this--the US military itself concedes as much! The minimum number of pushups required of men aged 17-21 to pass the army basic training physical fitness test is 35. For women in the same age range, that number is 11.